"We might be working on a PC-only title," said Epic's Mike Capps during a PAX East panel, reports Joystiq, saying Cliff Bleszinski followed this more concretely, saying: "Let me say that again: we are working on a PC game." After the panel Capps confirmed to them that this project is underway and that they currently plan on it being a PC exclusive, but no other details were offered.

Jerykk wrote on Apr 9, 2012, 00:45:You can make a F2P multiplayer shooter with unlockables that don't require money to unlock. However, you can typically pay to get these unlockables faster through XP boosts and what not. For gamers, the main benefit of F2P multiplayer games is that they can establish a decently-sized player base pretty quickly. Being F2P, there's no barrier to entry so pretty much anyone can try it out (and they do). The downside is that the business model relies on microtransactions, so you have to continually pump out new content and make it difficult to get unless you pay for it. Tribes: Ascend really doesn't need 50 different weapons but because they chose to go F2P, they don't really have any choice. If Epic makes a F2P UT game, I'd expect the same core set of weapons from the previous games, only with 10 different variants of each one. They may even go the T:A route and restrict weapons to specific classes, forcing players to unlock both the weapons and the classes that can actually use them, making XP boosters all the more enticing.

Given WarFace or whatever a F2P shooter would both surprise and not surprise me. On one hand, it's a trend and Epic probably feels they can do it better. On the other hand, it's a crowded market that no one has proven is at all lucrative.

The biggest issue with a F2P shooter is that everyone seems to think it should always be free and whines bitterly when they're expected to put some money into it. No company is doing this for charity, they're not able to collect data anyone would actually buy and they're not serving ads, so they need SOME money to survive. The other problem is that no one has made one in a way that doesn't feel cheap. Personally I think this is the biggest issue with F2P and it would be wiser to make a $15 or $20 game that really includes $15-$20 worth of content and more than enough to be competitive, with up to $50 in additional stuff you can buy to feel more competitive. Maybe.Honestly, the entire business model is probably designed to make people feel they're being screwed and nickel-and-dimed, even if they're getting more content for less than if it was normally priced.